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Just less than half of the European retail financial services institutions surveyed by Datamonitor are using J2EE as their primary environment for web-enabled application development. J2EE is doing particularly well in the UK, France and Germany, but still has some way to go in the Spanish and Italian markets.

As part of a survey of European retail banks and insurance companies, institutions were asked to name their strategic development environment for web-based application development. For 44% of interviewees, this was "primarily J2EE", while 17% answered "primarily .Net".

Interestingly, even though IBM and BEA are neck-to-neck in the overall applications server market, IBM's WebSphere platform has a commanding lead among J2EE-using European FSIs.

The same is true in the US. IBM is well entrenched in the larger financial institutions, even those that use WebLogic. You can name the top 10 in NYC and find out which (WL or WS) they're using (sometimes a bit of both). They all seem to like their privacy, so I can't disclose who uses what. Suffice to say, IBM still holds most of those accounts, and WebSphere is in at most.

Overall market, though (outside of core financial services), WebLogic still appears to hold a commanding lead, and it did win over WebSphere in several big financial services firms. Somewhat humorously, IBM Global Services introduced WebLogic into quite a few firms that we have done business with. Until the past 12-18 months, IBM-GS was highly "agnostic" about WebSphere vs. WebLogic, and prior to say 24 months ago, they were leaning the WebLogic way. You will note that WebLogic had good early support for MQ Series -- as good as the interfaces allowed -- and BEA pushed hard to get the JMS spec to support things like one app server using another vendor's JMS provider (e.g. transaction boundary issues) ... largely because of these accounts!

This article from the year 2000 is quite describing:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/inform/issues/issue29/v29_art29.html----------------------------
Merita Nordbanken - Its popular Solo Internet banking service has 530,000 customers, more than any other financial institution in the world, and relies on Compaq NonStop Himalaya S-series systems for this critical application. More than 2 million Internet transactions are processed every month. The 1998 Christmas rush saw a record 10 million transactions a day on Solo. The bank is at the forefront of Internet banking, per Merrill Lynch.
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10 million transactions a day in 1998. I knew that Finland was at the forefront of internet banking but still..

Merita Nordbanken - Its popular Solo Internet banking service has 530,000 customers, more than any other financial institution in the world, and relies on Compaq NonStop Himalaya S-series systems for this critical application. More than 2 million Internet transactions are processed every month. The 1998 Christmas rush saw a record 10 million transactions a day on Solo. The bank is at the forefront of Internet banking, per Merrill Lynch.

> P.S. II
> The himalaya is a Java/J2EE product

Really? I though Himalaya was a server family?

Looks like www.nordea.fi is running ASP pages, and the actual SOLO service is running some form of CGI. Maybe you could provide some more information about where J2EE is used in SOLO?

My mistake. I thought that Himalaya was a product family specially built to run java apps. Obviously this is not the case.

> Looks like www.nordea.fi is running ASP pages, and the actual SOLO service is
> running some form of CGI. Maybe you could provide some more information about
> where J2EE is used in SOLO?

Nordea might have it's front page implemented in ASP. For a big bank it's reasonable to use multiple technologies to avoid single vendor lock in situation.

Take a look at this link:link---- snip ----
The Finance Portal solution can aggregate your customers financial information and transactions from multiple sources into a personalised portal. The portal can be accessed with various terminal devices whenever the end-user wants by using a secured connection.

The solution is build on open J2EE architecture.

The Finance Portal has been developed in close co-operation with Nordea bank. The next generation internet banking system of Nordea is based on the Finance Portal solution.
---- snip ----
Are they lying? I don't know. Do they use other techniques (read .NET) too in their projects? I don't know.

The Finance Portal has been developed in close co-operation with Nordea bank. The next generation internet banking system of Nordea is based on the Finance Portal solution.

> ---- snip ----
> Are they lying? I don't know. Do they use other techniques (read .NET) too in their projects? I don't know.

I dont think they are lying, but it does say "the next generation", the current solution sure looks like a standard CGI app to me. The development - production phase for banking systems might be quite long though.

I have had it on my mind for some time now that I havent seen his posts. The place has lost a little of its charm since... I especially loved the "less lock-in with .Net" (the concept of less lock-in being "only locked in to one vendor" in his mind probably..) argument he put forward.
I hope he is alright in VB-land..

Ok, totally of topic.
To the topic: In scandinavia it seems like IBM has a good grip on the financial markets, primarily with db2, but also with websphere in newer projects. At least I have gotten that feeling from looking and hearing around what different banks and institutions use..

What happened to Rolf ? He is an intelligent guy. He was outlining often what all Java/J2EE supporters MUST never forget: That Java is not alone on the market, nor the best.

You seem to know many things, I personally wouldn't know whether java/j2ee is the best or not. I barely begun to really understand EJB stuff and I can't speak of .net. So I don't know if it is he best or not. If you can make such an assessment, you probably are very good.

DOn't know how it's these days, but few years back when I still used to work for IBM, Global Services had no qualms of going with non-IBM SW/HW, if it significanly increased chances of their success. They were quite a separate entity from the rest of IBM, which sometimes was quite interesting to watch :).
Regards,
Vlad

Well it couldn't be much worse than IBM support. I was co-developer on a financial project where we had to interface to an IBM mainframe. We initally used Candle ROMA - which was slow and not a great implementation. We then evaluated BEA and IBM solutions. The BEA solution just worked and was very quick to get up and running, but in the end IBM offered their stuff for free and BEA was something like $10K.

What a crock the IBM stuff was, we went through several major code iterations before we got something that worked... according to IBM it was all the fault of Solaris. In the end it cost us a fortune in lost development time and IBM 'consulting'... flying some guy who wrote the code over from Winchester in England. I've subsequently spoken to other customers who had problems.

My experience working with Websphere is that it is one of those big-clunky products where you are really obliged to get some consulting or hire very experienced admins/developers.

I think that significant factor is excelent interoperability
of Oracle and J2EE. Almost all large organizations are using Oracle (at least in Latvia, Baltic region). If you use Oracle with J2EE it gives a lot more benefits than other non-J2EE alternatives. Just think about TopLink, OC4J, BC4J, JDeveloper with Struts support etc.

BTW Last project I participated in was EU related project with Oracle/J2EE
technologies.

What is startling to me is that almost every 5th company named .NET as their primary IT infrastructure for web-based application. Given current state of .NET technology (comparing to 8 years of Java technology) it is a quite an achievement, in my opinion.

What is startling to me is that almost every 5th company named .NET as their primary IT infrastructure for web-based application. Given current state of .NET technology (comparing to 8 years of Java technology) it is a quite an achievement, in my opinion.

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